For partners & referrers
If you're thinking of sending someone my way.
Making an intro spends your credibility, not your money. So here is exactly who I am useful to, who I am not, and what I will and won't do with anyone you send — written so you can decide in two minutes without a call.
Send me
- Pre-seed through Series A, with a product that exists or is about to
- A research group, lab, or established company that needs senior engineering without a full-time hire
- A non-technical or technical-adjacent founder who needs architecture judgment
- Health tech, medical AI, or anything where regulators eventually read the code
- An AI feature that demos well and is falling over on real users
- A build that went wrong with an agency and needs an honest salvage-or-rewrite verdict
- A team of junior or mid-level engineers who need someone senior setting the bar
Don't send me
- Staff augmentation, or anyone who needs 40 hours a week
- Price shopping against offshore rates — I will lose that comparison and should
- Work already scoped and staffed that just needs more hands
- Pure strategy with no intention of anyone opening the repo
- Series B and beyond, where the right answer is a full-time VP of Engineering
- Anything requiring an active clearance or work performed on-site in a secure facility
- Deep specialisms I have not shipped: embedded firmware, games, blockchain
The second list matters more than the first. I would rather turn work away than have you spend credibility on an intro that goes nowhere — and if someone you send isn't a fit, I'll tell them within the first call and point them somewhere better.
What I commit to
Free technical triage for anyone you send
Whether or not they become a client. Thirty minutes with the engineer who would do the work, and a straight verbal assessment of where they stand — including "you don't need me" when that is the answer. Your referral costs them nothing and gets them something useful, which makes you look good regardless of what happens next.
For agency and studio partners: I won't take the account
If you send me overflow or a technical-leadership gap you don't staff, I work inside that scope and hand back. I won't pitch adjacent work, and I won't approach your client for anything you already do. If they ask me for something that's yours, I route it back to you.
You hear what happened
Within a week of the first conversation I'll tell you whether it was a fit and what I recommended — enough for you to know your intro landed well, and nothing that breaches their confidence.
No referral fees, in either direction
I don't pay for intros and I don't expect to be paid for mine. Fees change what gets recommended, and the whole value of a referral is that it wasn't bought. If I can send work your way, I will, on the same basis.
Copy-paste intro
So making the intro takes thirty seconds instead of drafting something from scratch. Edit freely.
Hi both — connecting you. Eric runs IN2Labs, a one-person senior engineering practice in Boston. He takes two kinds of work: fractional CTO engagements, and hands-on contract engineering — new builds, troubled codebases, and embedded work alongside an existing team. His background is regulated and AI-heavy — he was a principal investigator on an NSF SBIR grant, did R&D at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and currently serves as fractional CTO of a HIPAA-compliant health platform doing AI retinal image analysis. He offers a free 30-minute technical review, no strings: https://in2labs.dev/technical-triage I'll let you two take it from here.
Prefer to send a link instead? in2labs.dev/technical-triage is the one to forward — it explains the free offer and lets them self-select.
Partners this tends to work well with
Fractional CFOs and startup accountants, most of all — same buyer, same trigger events, and the scopes never overlap. Also: product and design agencies that hit a technical-leadership ceiling, startup-focused law firms, and angel groups or seed funds whose portfolio companies keep running into the same architecture questions.
If that's you and you'd rather talk before sending anyone, email me at eric@in2labs.dev or grab 30 minutes. Happy to do the reciprocal version of this page for what you do.